“Ten years ago people would come into a bar and order vodka. Now we have people coming in and naming the brand of bourbon they want in a Manhattan.” — Rich Ruth, former co-owner of Sidebar at Whiskey Row

Given that Dominic Roskrow is from the U.K., he might seem an unlikely advocate of American whiskey. “Yours is made to a vastly higher standard than Scotch,” says Dominic, author of The World’s Best Whiskies and editor of Whiskeria, Britain’s largest whiskey magazine. “There are rules governing what’s in the bottle, which we don’t have in Scotland. You have something really, really special. But makers of American whiskey haven’t been good at telling its story, which is amazing considering how loud and aggressive Americans can be.”

I decide to let this backhanded compliment slide, since Dominic has been such good company for the past few days and is so enthusiastic about our culture in general. We had met prior to our guided tour of America’s whiskey trail at a hotel bar in Nashville, Tennessee, where, to get in the spirit, we’d sampled several flights of Jack Daniel’s. We started with the Old No. 7, then Single Barrel and Gentleman Jack—and along the way discovered our common enthusiasm for quality spirits. While Dominic rhapsodized about America and the quality of its water and distilleries, we drifted figuratively from the deep smoky forests of Tennessee to the rolling, bluegrass-clad horse country of Kentucky, moving up the map like vapors of alcohol rising through a copper still.

Has America failed to tell its whiskey story? Well, someone’s getting the word out. Sales of super-premium American whiskies have doubled in five years while exports of U.S. spirits of all kinds have doubled over 10. And in recent years, the most storied brands have been joined by artisanal distillers from Florida to Alaska. There are now some 250 regional small-batch distillers compared with fewer than 50, 10 years ago.

“I don’t think there’s any question that we’re in bourbon’s heyday,” says Rich Ruth, former co-owner of Sidebar at Whiskey Row, a restaurant-bar in Louisville. “Ten years ago people would come into a bar and order vodka. Now we have people coming in and naming the brand of bourbon they want in a Manhattan.”

If that sounds like a contemporary trend, well, it may well be. But American whiskey is anything but trendy in the here-today-gone-tomorrow sense of the word. Indeed, whiskey (usually spelled without an “e” on the other side of the pond) has deep roots in American history. To tell the story, the Distilled Spirits Council mapped a route it calls the American Whiskey Trail that runs in an arc from Washington, D.C., through Pennsylvania and Kentucky into Tennessee, and Dominic and I and a few other passionate whiskey-philes set out to follow it.

To find out which distilleries produce some of the best and most popular whiskies in the U.S., pick up the March/April 2014 issue of The Saturday Evening Post on newsstands, or

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]]>My Aunt Mary Ann always made this four-layer whiskey cake for my father, a Christmas tradition dating back decades. For most of her life she kept the recipe secret, although she finally decided to share it with the rest of the family a few years ago. The resulting cake will be dense and heavy, like a fruitcake, with a strong whiskey odor and flavor.

Two warnings:

1. Obviously, this is not a particularly healthy dish, so don’t overdo it.

2. Because the whiskey in the cake is not cooked out, the dish is alcoholic, which means you won’t want to serve it to any kiddies (or teetotalers). Still, if you’re looking for an interesting and impressive new dish to serve adults this holiday season, give Aunt Mary Ann’s formerly confidential dessert a try!

Aunt Mary Ann’s Four-Layer Whiskey Cake

Ingredients:

Cakes:

1 cup room-temperature butter

2 cups sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

3 1/4 cups sifted flour

3 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

3/4 teaspoon salt

1 cup milk

8 egg whites

Icing:

8 egg yolks

1 1/4 cups sugar

1/2 cup butter

2 cups chopped pecans

2 cups finely chopped, seeded currants

1 3/4 cup shredded coconut

2 cups of finely chopped candied cherries (use a 50/50 mix of red and green to make it extra festive)

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup whiskey

Directions:

Cakes:
Preheat oven to 350°F.

Cream butter with electric mixer and gradually add in sugar. Beat mixture until light and fluffy; mix in vanilla.

Still using the electric mixer, slowly add in flour, baking powder, and salt. To keep the batter at a manageable consistency, alternate adding dry ingredients and splashes of milk. Beat batter until smooth.

In another bowl, beat egg whites (set aside egg yolks for the icing) with electric mixer on high until they’re stiff but not totally dry. Fold egg whites into cake batter with a spatula. Batter will be very thick.

Spoon batter evenly into four round, 9-inch, pre-greased baking pans. Bake for 15-20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the middle of the cakes comes out clean; remove from oven and let stand for 10 minutes before turning cakes out on wire cooling rack.

Icing:

While cakes cool, beat egg yolks with a fork and put them in a saucepan with sugar and butter. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly for about 5 minutes or until sugar is all dissolved and mixture has thickened slightly. Remove from heat and stir in the remaining icing ingredients. Let stand until cool.

Assembly:

Spread cooled icing between cake layers and on top of assembled cake.

Place the iced cake in an airtight container for 3 or 4 days to allow it to flavor before serving.

]]>“Freedom and whiskey go together,” wrote the Scottish poet Robert Burns. He was thinking of Scotland, but the principle applied to the United States as well where independent farmers enjoyed the right to distill and drink their own liquor without anyone’s approval.

Burns might have added that money and whiskey keep even closer company. Whiskey enabled farmers to convert their corn into a precious commodity that would keep its value for years. In parts of western Pennsylvania, whiskey was valuable enough to be used as currency and collateral. So it wasn’t surprising that these farmers rebelled when treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton put an excise tax on liquor. The Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, which followed, was put down when President Washington sent Federal troops into the region.

The tax was lowered slightly and pardons were handed out to the penitent. But a stubborn spirit of rebellion smoldered in the countryside and a long tradition of illicit whiskey distilling began.

In southern states, opposition to tax on homemade whiskey became something of an institution. Moonshiners gained a national reputation for continuing their resistance to the revenue collectors. Their reputation grew during Prohibition as they moved vast amounts of illegal whiskey into the cities across moonlit country highways in specially customized roadsters. Post author William Price Fox interviewed moonshiners who had been in business in the ’20s.

Edwin C. Arthur stands amid a collection of moonshine containers taken during a South Side raid.

“We had us some nice races back then,” a veteran recalls. “I had me a 1926 Buick that wouldn’t quit. Had the back end jacked up so high with special heavy-duty springs it looked like a jackrabbit with a sore tail when it wasn’t loaded down with seven- or nine-hundred rounds of whiskey. And smoke screens? Why we had us more smoke back then before anyone ever heard of your Mister Al Capone. Used a specially welded little steel box that held about two gallons. Put maybe a gallon of crude oil in and put the can under pressure with a gas-station air pump. I kept that can right by my right knee when I drove and had her linked up through the manifold. All I had to do was throw a little petcock and that stuff would come out looking like ink.

“Later on we got so we’d add a little creosote in with the crude oil; that would make it stick to the windshield of the Law’s car, and I mean you couldn’t ever get it off unless you used soap and water and a razor blade.”

Moonshiners learned how to compete with bootleggers by giving their product the look of true Scotch whiskey.

Their bottles were appropriately neck-labeled, stamped with the proper Scotch or Canadian tax stamp, and wrapped in salt-water-damaged paper and broom straw to give the appearance of whiskey smuggled into this country after a terrible time on the high seas.

The old-timers swear that when Prohibition ended and the real brands began appearing, people thought they were being duped. They wanted the old rectified and smoke-up corn, and were suspicious of any substitutes.

There are several designs for a still. The best known uses a pot or “cooker,” which captures vapors from the “mash” of corn and sugar and passes them through a condenser coil.

The simplest model is the 200-year-old Horse-Blanket Still. In this type, the mash is cooked in a big pot over an open fire. A thick horse blanket is laid over the pot to collect the steam. When the blanket is saturated with steam, it is run through a clothes wringer, and the moisture that is wrung out is whiskey. The taste will vary, but basically it’s of wool, of earth, of horse and of very, very strong corn whiskey.

John Bowman (right), in his garage, explains the workings of a moonshine still to Mary Hufford and John Flynn.

I’m betting that this whiskey tasted a LOT more of horse than is suggested here.

When Fox wrote “The Lost Art of Moonshine” in 1966, he believed “private distilling” would soon disappear. He needn’t have worried. Today, thousands of Americas—up to 100,000 according to one author—are distilling their own whiskey despite Federal law that forbids any unlicensed, untaxed distilling. Convicted of moonshining, you may face up to five years in jail and a fine up to $50,000.

Because every dollar spent on liquor yields about 50¢ in taxes, Washington D.C. wants to make sure that money and whiskey continue to go together. And, unlike in 1794, they aren’t handing out pardons.